English class?

Well... Just naturally, anyone would much rather be approached about something they do wrong in a good manner. No one likes to have people badger them in an unfriendly way, but if youre friendly about something, its going to draw more attention than not. Being an ass will probably drive the people from the boards. (I know some people should be driven away.) Some of you may think, "Good, the boards are better off without them." But the boards are a community for everyone, not just select people.

Im just saying, there will be more and better results if youre nice. Dont confuse 'nice' with being a carebear either. Nice is what you are to your friends... Well, most of the time, lol. Some people have some evil friends...
I agree that being nice will work more often with more people than being mean. The problem is that there are plenty of people who are either too stupid, immature, or just plain stubborn to be willing to take any kind of critique and won't change at all. What I am saying is that you guaranteeing that everyone will respond better to just being nice is patently false. If they have no incentive to change, they won't no matter how nicely you ask them. When being nice fails, it's just easier to be an ass.
 
I agree that being nice will work more often with more people than being mean. The problem is that there are plenty of people who are either too stupid, immature, or just plain stubborn to be willing to take any kind of critique and won't change at all. What I am saying is that you guaranteeing that everyone will respond better to just being nice is patently false. If they have no incentive to change, they won't no matter how nicely you ask them. When being nice fails, it's just easier to be an ass.

And really, it absolutely matters that they spell correctly. I mean, this board will eventually break if they don't, right? I can already see it splitting at the seams. Better to tell them to get their act together. ASAP! Because they'll very likely learn from a video game forum. I can imagine they're paying attention to every single post related to how badly their spelling sucks.

Who's dillusional?
 
Ok, So i'm basically going to just say it. Who the FUCK cares if someone spells or uses a damn word wrong?Honestly do you assholes(people who don't respond to the thread just bash on people for grammer and spelling) just sit around and wait for a damn thread to pop up with bad grammer and spelling.Honestly do you get off to it?It's not helping the person or QCDN.org.If people read it oviously they'll see the mistakes, you don't need to go out and bash them even more.It's just down right rude.This game is based around having fun and escape life. Than people have to come in here and be treated like their in fucking english class?No!Seriously, just leave the fucking people alone.Who cares if i spell no when its suppose to mean know,Or write there when it's suppose to mean their?It's not a fucking big deal.This crap has pissed me off to long and I know their are other people out there.

It's qcdn not fucking english class.
And yes maybe if you can barly read it, it would be ok.
It "chat" talk EVERYONE does it from time to time.
So please lay off you asshole out there who think its cool to bash people about this crap.

P.S. now this thread will show who the real assholes are on qcdn.:rtfm:


Quoted just because hes totally right and because I think the same way.
 
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basically saying, you have a better chance it will work when compared to being an ass. lol

I agree with what your saying people always try harder when you are nice to them. It just bugs me when people guarantee that things will happen sometimes it just sounds dumb. If your going to gaurantee something say it will or won't happen.

Edit: BTW its just a pet peeve because a friend of mine used to do it all the time.
 
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I couldn't pick up German at all. It was just too different from English.

You are joking right? I find German the easiest foreign language to learn. There's a lot of similarities with English even if you don't notice them at first. Still I get stuck on gender far too often. Hopefully with Chiimi and my upcoming degree in German/Japanese I should sort it out.
 
Who's dillusional?
The people who think I'm talking about having everyone spell perfectly every time and always using the correct grammar.

Ruffyreborn was talking about ways to get people to try to improve, I was doing the same thing. This has nothing to do with the vast, vast majority of posters; only on how we could get those few whose posts look like they were written by a monkey to write at a second-grade(or higher, hopefully) level.
 
This has nothing to do with the vast, vast majority of posters; only on how we could get those few whose posts look like they were written by a monkey to write at a second-grade(or higher, hopefully) level.

Yes I agree.
 
The people who think I'm talking about having everyone spell perfectly every time and always using the correct grammar.

Ruffyreborn was talking about ways to get people to try to improve, I was doing the same thing. This has nothing to do with the vast, vast majority of posters; only on how we could get those few whose posts look like they were written by a monkey to write at a second-grade(or higher, hopefully) level.

My problem is I like to play devil's advocate...

I guess what I'm saying is that even if we ridicule these FEW people to death, they just won't care. They're not going to suddenly pop on to qcdn and be like, "Hey guys! I can spell! This is terrific!"

It's really not going to matter. I mean really, so far, how many people have changed?

EDIT: And when the hell did I pass 2000 posts? Where the hell are my bottle rockets?
 
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I have to say, the written word is far more important to take seriously than the spoken word. It's a lot easier to misinterpret or convey the wrong message unintentionally. Everytime you lose a mode of contact, be it visual (moving lips, hand gestures, facial expressions, etc.) or auditory (tones, timing, etc.), you make it harder for the other person(s) to understand exactly what it is you are trying to convey. That isn't to say you need to spell everything correctly, check your grammar, dot your I's and cross your T's, but to at least give an attempt so the other readers can get the most out of your posts without getting the wrong idea. At the same time, readers should be a lot more forgiving when a comment is taken for something else as well.
 
It's fairly cut and dry. If people want their posts to be read (and I assume they do), they need to have a basic grasp of the language. A post in which every second word is misspelt or where syntax is so skewed that it's just one lump of words, will be ignored by a sizable chunk of the userbase.

Why? Because said people are snots? No. It is because if a poster writes unintelligently, then one can easily assume that they have nothing intelligent to say (or if the errors are too great, that the colossal effort required to decipher what is being said outweighs any possible "reward").

Yes this is a video game forum - so what? If you are simply too lazy to construct coherent sentences because you don't find it necessary to do so here, then how do you expect to communicate? Through a series of grunts and gurgling noises? It's not that hard to write legibly. No one is asking for a thesis.
 
Yes this is a video game forum - so what? If you are simply too lazy to construct coherent sentences because you don't find it necessary to do so here, then how do you expect to communicate? Through a series of grunts and gurgling noises? It's not that hard to write legibly. No one is asking for a thesis. It's fairly cut and dry. If people want their posts to be read (and I assume they do), they need to have a basic grasp of the language. A post in which every second word is misspelt or where syntax is so skewed that it's just one lump of words, will be ignored by a sizable chunk of the userbase.

Why? Because said people are snots? No. It is because if a poster writes unintelligently, then one can easily assume that they have nothing intelligent to say (or if the errors are too great, that the colossal effort required to decipher what is being said outweighs any possible "reward").

Yes this is a video game forum - so what? If you are simply too lazy to construct coherent sentences because you don't find it necessary to do so here, then how do you expect to communicate? Through a series of grunts and gurgling noises? It's not that hard to write legibly. No one is asking for a thesis.

Ignoring someone is also completely different than being a snot. FYI.

Being a snot is more about "lol you mean they're?".

Kinda what Kotsu was doing, only he was joking. So it was funny.

Yes this is a video game forum - so what? If you are simply too lazy to construct coherent sentences because you don't find it necessary to do so here, then how do you expect to communicate? Through a series of grunts and gurgling noises? It's not that hard to write legibly. No one is asking for a thesis.
I read ruffy's post in its entirety WITH it's purposeful misspellings. I can read MOST people's posts. The only posts I ever actually skip are the wall o'texts and the 3 page essays just for lack of time. It's really not that difficult. Now, like I said, when it comes to blazn and yusuke, those two are a completely different story. They go from "making mistakes" to just giving the English language the finger.
 
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To summarize:

Egregious spelling and/or grammatical errors, to the point where the process of getting at the content of your message could best be described as "deciphering" rather than "reading" - that's bad.

Wall-o-text, also bad. Particularly if combined with the above, but even if the writing is otherwise fine but paragraphs are enormous.

Nitpicking occasional or forgivable errors, *also* bad. It's making too big a deal about nothing and giving the impression that it's not even worth *trying*, because you'll hear about it if you're anything less than perfect.

Using abbreviations - situational. Stuff like "lol" and "btw" are easily recognized abbreviations of significantly longer phrases (and lol in particular is never used unabbreviated anyway) and aren't really a problem.

Stuff like "u" and "r" and "2" is abbreviating a whole one or two letters out of a word, and while it may be viable in a game or IM conversation or anything where the *speed* at which you type stuff is important ... it's just plain pointless to do in a longer thing (like a message board post) that you're taking the time to *compose*.

At that point you're sacrificing readability for, really, absolutely no purpose (congratulations, you have annoyed/confused your reader to save yourself approximately 0.2 seconds and one keystroke, you have an *excellent* grasp of worthwhile tradeoffs). But again, there's gray area here, and people will have differing opinions on what's reasonable and what's not.

Pointing out the particularly blatant problems (*not* nitpicking a few things in otherwise readable posts) - that's good. Politeness is a good place to start but if they don't bother listening (they ignore you entirely, or they spout off the good old "this isn't school" "this isn't English class" "this isn't a thesis" "it's only the internet" arguments, or whatever), then there's no reason to continue showing them the respect of politeness when they don't show you respect in return.

It's safe to assume that anyone who's been continually chastized for being exceptionally unreadable on these forums, and is *still* exceptionally unreadable (i.e. their posts must be "deciphered", not "read", as I said above) is long since past the point where it's worth bothering to be polite to them on the subject.

Summary over, my two cents:

Of course, common sense says that if they've heard about it for this long and still haven't improved, they ain't gonna improve in future and it's not worth giving them the power to put you into an aggravated mood on the subject. Therefore, I reiterate the best advice for the chronically unreadable posters (such as Blazn, Yusuke, Hellstorm) - if they make a typically unreadable post, simply pretend they didn't post anything and go on with the topic without deciphering or replying to their posts. If they make something readable, feel free to reply to it.

Giving someone your full attention (and indeed, extra attention for the "deciphering" part) even when they couldn't be bothered to lift a finger to write readably, means they have no motivation whatsoever to do so. However, if it means that they effectively stop getting paid attention to, that loss of attention would be a far more powerful motivator than any criticism. It's like dealing with children who act out, after all - they want attention and don't care if it's good or bad, and the best way to get them to behave is to ignore them (or only give them the most passing of acknowledgment) unless they do something deserving of *positive* attention.
 
Breaking up a post into a dozen tiny paragraphs can be annoying, but sometimes it can't be helped. The point of different paragraphs is to break up your ideas into organized but readable form, and sometimes you only have a couple sentences to say on an idea before moving onto the next. I'd rather see 5 short paragraphs than 5 separate topics covered in the same paragraph. It would make it much easier to read and follow.
 
You could always just re-word the first sentence in your paragraph to include multiple points and then elaborate on them. There's really no point in breaking up your points so much that they can only fit in tiny paragraphs. Try turning in an essay at school with a two-sentence paragraph. You'll get busted for that so damn quick that it's almost kind of funny.

I don't honestly expect someone to write out a typical seven-sentence paragraph like they would for an essay. But it's really not that hard to elaborate on a single point so that it could take four sentences at least. And if you can't, then it's really not that hard to combine multiple smaller points into one paragraph. I'm sure you've done it in school. A single paragraph should take up more than two lines of text, and probably no more than about eight at the most.

And if you're really in need of absolutely having to use short sentences, dumb your points down into a list like so:

1) Grammar is good
2) I like cheese
3) Pay attention to punctuation
4) i no hwo 2 spel awesome
5) This is point number 5

Actually, here's another example that uses a list and probably fits more closely to the summary post:

Vilurum said:
Nitpicking
Doing this to occasional or forgivable errors is *also* bad. It's making too big a deal about nothing and giving the impression that it's not even worth *trying*, because you'll hear about it if you're anything less than perfect.
 
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Just to put it out there, but is it somehow wrong to expect people to have a grasp on the language, equal to what the world expects of them? Yes or no. Thats all.

If you can't type for shit, learn. If you can't spell for shit, learn. Yes, if you cannot do either, barring mental handicaps, you are less of a person. The fact that there are people who do not put the effort in to their spelling and typing abilities who are out of high school/college is quite sickening. Do yourself a favor and kill yourself if you fall in that category, because you're just a waste of oxygen at that point.

Sure, that sounds cruel, but when is expecting mediocrity a bad thing? Nothing on Earth is friendly to those that can't even make it over the already miniscule bar set in place. I'm not asking for everyone to know the latin names of animals and to spell the correctly, just to be able to spell out full words, that are used very often, correctly.
 
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Just to put it out there, but is it somehow wrong to expect people to have a grasp on the language, equal to what the world expects of them? Yes or no. Thats all.

If you can't type for shit, learn. If you can't spell for shit, learn. Yes, if you cannot do either, barring mental handicaps, you are less of a person. The fact that there are people who do not put the effort in to their spelling and typing abilities who are out of high school/college is quite sickening. Do yourself a favor and kill yourself if you fall in that category, because you're just a waste of oxygen at that point.

Sure, that sounds cruel, but when is expecting mediocrity a bad thing? Nothing on Earth is friendly to those that can't even make it over the already miniscule bar set in place. I'm not asking for everyone to know the latin names of animals and to spell the correctly, just to be able to spell out full words, that are used very often, correctly.

So no points for trying, eh? ;)

I mean i try not to grammar/spelling nazi people simply because i don't have much room to talk at any given point in time. Sometimes it's blatant, and bears the point and laugh routine. That's one thing. But would you take it that seriously as to actually sit and all but grade everything you read on, of all places, the internet?

Seriously if it's that bad start ... i don't know, smoking or go on vacation or something, man.
 
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Heh, ya know, a 7 sentence paragraph (unless it's made up of very short sentences) on a forum usually ends up looking long enough that it's become a wall of text. While I dislike the argument in general, the basic point *is* true that we're not writing essays here, so some of the grammatical points are different. For example, a reasonably sized "forum paragraph" is approximately 3-4 sentences, not 7. As such, a 2 sentence paragraph on a forum is only slightly short, not egregiously short, while a 7 sentence paragraph on a forum is painfully long. This paragraph here has 5 sentences, and to my eye it looks unnaturally long for a paragraph in a forum post.

Out of curiosity, how would you rewrite my points? I could, I suppose, have condensed them into one-sentence points without explanation and made them into a list. However, I felt like they needed a *little* more explanation than that would have given. But I did only feel like they needed a *little* more explanation, not a lot, so I didn't feel any particular need to expound on each of them into a nice long paragraph of its own. (Especially considering how big my post already was.)

Oh and, by the way ... I'm weird and like to improve my writing style, which is why I'm responding in good nature like this. But to be honest, I *would* lump your criticism to me under the umbrella of "nitpicking". Since you quoted my opinion of that, I'm sure I don't need to repeat it to you. Or did you comment on it in the first place in an attempt to imply that someone must be in all ways perfect themselves, before they can criticize others who are less perfect than they are? (That would be quite a fallacy if you did, so I'll assume to your credit that you did not.)
 
You could always just re-word the first sentence in your paragraph to include multiple points and then elaborate on them. There's really no point in breaking up your points so much that they can only fit in tiny paragraphs. Try turning in an essay at school with a two-sentence paragraph. You'll get busted for that so damn quick that it's almost kind of funny.

Except that this isn't school. I'm sure Vilurum knows how to compose an essay and what the requirements of an essay-sized paragraph are. However, this is a message board and we're not, exactly, composing essays here.

So what to do about two sentence paragraphs? Well, considering that his sentence structure was completely error-free and he had two valid points in his paragraph, I would say... deal. It's not like he did it on purpose just to annoy you, nor is this the proper place to grade someone on how 'their essay/post looked'.

Oh, and if you didn't realize, there is something called 'style.' You can have a style of writing that omits the need for long, length paragraphs.
 
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